MuseumDESCRIPTION:
The Museum’s Michael Graham tells us about a Congolese school he visited in June that was right on the front lines between rebel and government forces, protected by a few peacekeepers. With new rounds of fighting beginning in August, these civilians, and hundreds of thousands of others are at risk today.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to this week’s Voices on Genocide Prevention. Before we get started I’d like to request all of listeners to answer some questions in our new podcast survey that we have initiated. The web address is www.ushmm.org/podcastsurvey. We’d like to hear more about why you’re listening and what you’d like to see in the future. With me today is one of my own colleagues, Michael Graham, who is the editor of the Committee on Conscience of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s World Is Witness. World Is Witness is a new geoblog. And we’ll ask Michael to help us understand what that is which is part of our partnership that the Museum has with Google Earth.
Michael, Thank you for joining me here today.
MICHAEL GRAHAM: It is great to be here.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Can you explain for us what is a geoblog?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: A geoblog is, you could think of it as a match up of a blog with a map. Every post we send from the field, every photograph, all of the content we do at the Museum is mapped to a location. We believe this will do two things. It gives the visitor context of the story of where it’s happening and it also allows us to make it available through tools like Google Earth and reach a much wider audience than we could normally.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: You’ve taken several trips then to Africa. To Chad, to Southern Sudan, and to Congo. Your most recent trip was to June, right? Where did you go in Congo on that trip.
MICHAEL GRAHAM: In a lot of ways that trip to Congo was a repeat of an original trip we did by Museum staff in November of last year. That was during an upsurge in the fighting between Laurent Nkunda’s rebel CNDP forces.
This is a rebel group that has been engaged infighting the Congolese army. A Tutsi rebel group. Their main concern is the continued presence of Hutu militias in Eastern Congo. Some called the FDLR Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda. Their stated purpose is to liberate Rwanda. But many of them are of former genocidaires of the genocide.
The first trip there had been a tremendous new round of fighting. And Jerry Fowler and I visited North Kivu, which is the province on the northern shores of Lake Kivu on the border with Rwanda and we also visited South Kivu. The fighting was taking place in North Kivu. When we arrived, the fighting had been going about a day or two. And we visited several displaced camps around the North Kivu capitol of Goma and witnessed really atrocious conditions in terms of the people with living without protection from the elements. Displaced camps has been placed on volcanic lava fields. Field that were cerate when the volcano right outside the capitol exploded, I believe it was 2002, created these tremendous fields of lava. We witnessed really horrible things in terms of the civilian population. We also heard stories of tremendous sexual violence being committed against women and girls in North Kivu and South Kivu. Including several stories that were very fresh from the fighting. One girl talked about some of Nkunda’s rebel soldiers who had attacked her just the week before.
The follow up trip for me this past June was to get a sense of how the situation for civilians as well as for sexual violence, and the overall situation between Nkunda’s rebels and the government and militias had changed. In a lot of ways things had changed quite significantly I thought at the time. It seemed much calmer . A lot of civilian areas that we visit villages that we visited that were near the front line or on the front lines had much better security Either provided by the UN forces, MONUC, or provided by in some part by the Congolese army.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: I wondered if we could stop for a moment. I want to describe a photo that you took during this trip at a time when, as you said, it seemed like the ceasefire -- although everyone knew it was fragile -- was holding and people had some measure of security. It is a photo – and for our listeners, you can see it in World Is Witness. It is really astonishing. It is a UN peacekeeper holding a heavy arm, a large gun, with barbed wire wrapped around and then just a few feet or yards behind him, a group of school children playing soccer. Can you set up for us where was that school? And how was it benefitting at the time from that ceasefire?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: One of the areas I visited on this latest trip was called Rugari. I went with some UN peacekeepers from Goma of the Indian brigade. We arrived there, about an hour from Goma, in the morning. They told me we were going to the front line basically between Nkunda’s soldiers and the government where the UN had created a buffer zone between the two forces. When we got there, there was a school. At first I thought it was just a building that the UN had taken over to use as their base. But then realized very quickly that it was a fully operational school of several hundred children literally on the front line. A stone’s throw away from both the government soldiers behind us and ahead of us the rebel positions up in the hills. It was pretty incredible to see kids going to school right on the front line protected by a few dozen UN peacekeepers.
When I got to the school, I talked to several of the officers that were there and they pointed out the positions up in the hills that you could barely make out. They told me that these places were the positions of the rebels. They were maybe 800 meters, 1000 meters away. You could see, kind of glinting in the sun whether it was the tin shack or some other sort of roof giving away their position. Basically the population of Rugari, the adults had just started coming back in the past few weeks to farms their fields again. Their fields were up in the hills underneath the rebel positions. Before the UN peacekeepers had arrived with their mobile base set up in that school, they had been, according to local leaders we talked to, harassed by the rebels. When they went out to farm, they were beaten up, there were incidents of sexual violence, a lot of looting and that sort of thing. They had been forced to leave the area and not farm.
When the UN peacekeepers got there, they had been able to start farming during the day -- although at night the adults and the children as well left that area to go back to one of the displaced camps nearby to sleep.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: So it was still a very tenuous situation, but at least children had the capacity to go to school and some agricultural production was ongoing. Can you tell us what happened recently in Congo that disrupted that?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: I left Rugari feeling fairly confident in the ability of the peacekeepers to protect some civilians. I thought it was a very good example of what was possible with very few peacekeepers. About two months after I got back to the US, I was talking to colleagues back in Congo who were warning that the situation was out of hand. Fighting erupted in that same area. Basically, Nkunda’s rebels and the government had fought in Rugari. This was in late August and they continue to fight today.
It has really gotten severe in terms of the level of heavy fighting, including tanks and artillery. I haven’t been able to confirm what has happened to those kids or to the school or the community of Rugari, but it is certainly the front line and the report so fighting coming out of there. One of the effects of these clashes has been the displacement of -- the UN estimates 150,000 people in various areas of North Kivu. That is on top of the nearly 1 million people displaced this past year, year and a half from previous rounds of fighting. So it’s really an awful situation right now. The ceasefire has completely collapsed. There is very little hope in the immediate future of getting people back to the table.
There was a peace conference in January of this year that was a response to the fighting we had witnessed in November. That came up with a ceasefire agreement between the rebels and the government. It had been holding tenuously for the past eight months. There had been some minor ceasefire violations: some re-arming, banditry, looting and that sort of thing. But nothing on the level of what we’d seen over the past six weeks. The peace deal has collapsed pretty completely.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Michael, thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. For our listeners, we’ll continue to update you on the situation, about what is happening in this recent round of fighting, and other efforts to bring some stability and really just some respite for the civilians of Congo.
Again, I would like to ask listeners to please take a moment to complete our podcast survey so we can make sure we’re getting you the information you’re interested in. It is at www.ushmm.org/podcastsurvey. That is one word, podcastsurvey. Thank you, Michael.
MICHAEL GRAHAM: My pleasure.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you’ll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.
